And now these three remain…faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love. ~1 Corinthians 13:13

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It’s a strange feeling, standing here in this mostly empty house. It has been nearly 3 years, but it still feels like home. It’s hard, renting out the place that once was your home. Hard to let it go and hope that another loves it half as much as you.

What’s harder, though, is the way I feel as I wash these walls that used to hold the little hand prints of my kids when they were still so small. Oh, I miss those days! I am aching with a deep longing to press rewind, go back in time and live those days over again…the simplicity of the then when they were small and when the days that they’d be grown seemed so distant. Eldest, he’s taller than his father now and Middle Child is borrowing clothes from my closet. Youngest had her 11th birthday a few weeks ago; and it’s beautiful how they’re growing up and they are wonderful at this age and still…oh, I just want the time to move slower. Sometimes being a mother feels like one big chain of goodbyes, every proud accomplishment also stitched with the ache of loss. We’ll never pass this way again, and if we do this thing right we’ll work our way right out of the job we love the most.

So I’m scrubbing and crying, and my husband comes alongside and he wants to know why. So I try my best to tell him how these feelings are swarming in my heart, this sense of loss and this grief over how quickly the days are passing, how you can’t hold onto anything more than the memories and how time just won’t stop stealing the days.

He says he understands. And then he says, it’s one thing he’s looking forward to about Heaven: That the loss we feel due to time passing will never be an issue again. And if I could go back, when would it be? A few years ago, when high school and college seemed distant? A decade ago, when all three of them fit on my lap? Back to 20, when our bodies were still perfect and the world was an open book? Or to our own childhoods, when worries were limited to passing Friday’s spelling test?

We didn’t feel the way we do now about those seasons in life then, when we were living them. It’s the now that gives us the perspective to love the “then” so much, the now of knowing that whatever crisis was bothering us at that time passed, whatever worries we had were really not as big as the blessings we had and it all turned out OK, it was all grace. We made it, and it was good. It’s the vantage point of “now” that puts life into perspective, makes the past seem such a warm, safe place to return.

As hard as it might be to believe?The truth is, today is the yesterday we will long for tomorrow.(Click to Tweet)Time will grant us the perspective to see: Today is beautiful, and grace-filled, and important. We’ll never pass this way again.

Oh Lord, please grant me the faith to live today as I will see it a year from now, or five or ten! Grant me the faith to really live in the knowledge that it’s all grace, all God-gifted, that the worries we have now are not as big as the blessings, that whatever comes our way we’ll make it and it will all be good. Grant me the grace to live this moment and this day and this season in gratitude and wonder, and see every minute of it as the blessing it is. Take my desire to hit “rewind” and change it into the reminder to hit “pause,” to stop and appreciate the beautiful now and love it for the gift that it is.

Linking up with these beautiful ladies: Emily at Imperfect Prose Jennifer’s Tell His Story